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That's a strong assertion, I'm sure university level education can help give tools to people to help people understand facts, think critically etc if they study the right thing; I would be really cautious of applying that universally.
What I've seen mostly is a different kind of groupthink, where critical thinking and open, curious and honest discussion is not tolerated.
I could be wrong and my experiences are of course anecdotal. I get much more honest and genuinely curious discussion on HackerNews than from University graduates.
Yes, a better educated population is considered a net benefit for society, which was the impetus for mandatory education, evidently society considers that there are diminishing returns and those happen at around age 16 for British citizens. I would like to understand who decided that age and why.
In my experience it really hasn't been hard to find a home for every position at a reasonably-sized school: fraternities and clubs are all over the spectrum (often actively endorsed and sponsored by the school).
Even at UC Berkeley, one of the largest organizations here is the Berkeley College Republicans — and last year I attended a Turning Point USA event officially hosted by San Francisco State University perfectly fine (even with it being the "leftist" school that established Ethnic Studies).
A generalization that is worded like a sci-fi blockbuster logline doesn't seem to square with critical discussion — if anything it comes across as a redigestion of online forum posts and second-hand accounts. It's hard to say any university of a reasonable size has one monolithic culture, even within the same department.
Are HN commenters not mainly university graduates? My impression is that HN commenters are disproportionately university graduates compared to other social networks.
Not even because they are dumb nor lack critical thinking. They simply care a lot less about online communities compared to physical relationships, or are focused on their careers, etc. Commenters on any community are subject to the 1% rule; there are a LOT more lurkers than commenters on any given platform.
One of the virtues of the industry being extremely immature is that the gates are not fully established, so you are more likely to have a strong mix of paths to reach senior. Especially amongst devops/infra, "full stack" developers or founders. Which seems to be the usual haunt on here.
Speaking of the tech industry, autodidacts and bootcampers are not mutually exclusive with university graduates. For example, I taught myself computer programming, but I also have a Masters degree in philosophy.
In any case, what exactly is your experience in discussion with university graduates exclusively, that you can compare it with Hacker News discussion? By the way, I suspect that my esteem for HN discussion is a lot lower than yours.
I have a masters in financial economics and another in business.
Definitely true, but it's largely semantics at this point, the original discussion was regarding the notion that university prepares those who attend to fight fascism by being immune to propaganda or disinformation.
> what exactly is your experience in discussion with university graduates exclusively, that you can compare it with Hacker News discussion?
This will be a controversial point because I will be accused of having "a side" (because this is the world we have become now it seems). However what I have witnessed and interacted with is that students largely convert to the university prevailing ideology and will follow it as dogma. This can be for social pressure reasons, or I would venture that it could even be part of how the environment has to be for undergrads (IE: ingestion techniques largely focus on regurgitation, not innovation or deep thought, only surface level if anything). Thus when people I interact with talk to me, they can hold opposing ideas in their head simultaniously without being able to reason about why they hold that belief.
For an extremely prescient example, Swedish university students will march for Palestine against Israel using flags made in China (where there is a huge active genoice against the Uyghur Muslim population). Additionally they will loudly support Palestine while simultaneously supporting gay and trans rights- which is clearly a huge conflict. Sweden as a country itself is already pro-Palestine, being one of the first countries to be so (first country in Europe to recognise it as a state for example). Similarly the issues of Feminism have come to Sweden, when Sweden does the most (by far) to promote equality of gender, womens rights and the right to bodily autonomy -- but when questioned on what rights they will be unable to come up with anything other than really high level buzzwords like Patriarchy, the plight of the Swedish Feminist typically lives on the subjugation of women in other countries (as a fallback).
It's ok to have these beliefs, of course it is, so please don't misunderstand me. It just becomes clear when discussing things that people who espouse these views from university and believe in them fervently (to the point where they cannot even engage in conversation without thinking that you are a Nazi or a Misogynist or a Zionist or some "other" group label) -- clearly have only surface level knowledge of the issue. It's pure ignorance and profound belief that propels the thought because of this they can't reason it or think critically about it, so they immediately reject a conversation. If they are forced into a conversation they become quickly defensive and frustrated as they lack the base understanding of the issue so they can't reason nuance or reason why situations might be different between seemingly similar issues.
Similarly those who study economics can only think of the world as money generating and revenue and begin to lack basic empathy of the human condition. -- It's like they've had critical thinking and nuance stripped. (this is a huge generalisation of course).
> I suspect that my esteem for HN discussion is a lot lower than yours.
Probably not, I also don't regard HN discussion as the highest form of conversation, but it's far-and-away from the worst. University students are not equal, many many university students have just figured out that they need to regurgitate what they hear to get by: and they do so, without understanding deeply or thinking critically.
I'm neither defending nor disputing that notion. I'm just questioning the assumption that HN commenters are more enlightened as a group than university graduates.
> what I have witnessed and interacted with
Those are two different things. Passively watching the news, for example, doesn't count as having a discussion with university graduates; not to mention that the news isn't a representative sample. I was asking about your experience with discussions. And it feels like you're cherry-picking very specific issues, when of course university graduates have discussions about an extremely wide variety of issues, just as Hacker News commenters do.
> students largely convert to the university prevailing ideology and will follow it as dogma
What exactly do you think is the university prevailing ideology? Note that university administrators have mostly been vehemently, sometimes violently opposed to student protesters. In any case, nobody arrives at university as a blank slate. Students bring their preexisting views with them. Moreover, the student population is hardly uniform. You'll always find a significant number of conservative Christian students, for example, at any large university in the US. Somehow they escaped indoctrination (at university).
> Similarly those who study economics can only think of the world as money generating and revenue and begin to lack basic empathy of the human condition. -- It's like they've had critical thinking and nuance stripped. (this is a huge generalisation of course).
This is a huge stereotype of course. But you also have to ask yourself which students are attracted to the study of economics in the first place. Your major and coursework is mostly voluntarily chosen at college, which raises more questions about the "indoctrination" theory in general.
2) You're ignoring communism and the far-left. Plenty of disastrous ideas are produced in a vacuum by intellectuals at universities. To give just one example: Khieu Samphan, was educated at the Sorbonne. His ideas lead to the deaths of a quarter of Cambodia's population.
3) Even if we give you 1 and 2, where do you stop? How much money should be poured into education (esp if it's the taxpayer)? Resisting fascism seems like one of those infinite 'our work is never done' things that have unbounded demands.
I'd argue that the fraction of income that goes to administration should be regulated and capped to a fraction of the whole. Ultimately, most administration has little to do with education, and lots to do with expanding and increasing its own income.
On the other hand, giving money to institutions like NASA, CERN, INRIA and the likes is overall beneficial to society and its out of such institutions that we can make progress that benefits the overall good.
It's been established that companies exist only for the purpose of enriching the stock holders (according to CEOs that follow Welch's paradigm), therefore companies don't generally have any incentive to push for innovation and publish their findings unless that — in one way or the other — benefits them.
> This brain region is involved in a wide range of higher-order cognitive functions, including speech formation (Broca's area), gaze (frontal eye fields), working memory (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), and risk processing (e.g. ventromedial prefrontal cortex). The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.[3] Many authors have indicated an integral link between a person's will to live, personality, and the functions of the prefrontal cortex.[4]
> This brain region has been implicated in executive functions, such as planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior and controlling certain aspects of speech and language.[5][6][7][8] Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially unacceptable outcomes).
"Take out a student loan so you can get a degree and get a good job that will pay off the loan and get you secure."
vs
"Take out a student loan, even though you have a 50% chance of dropping out and being left a renter working at McDonalds and a mountain of student debt... so that you'll know how to fight fascism."
Obviously the financial ROI is what is most important here to the people who have a greatest stake in matter. Getting people into financial trouble to prepare them to fight any sort of political extremism is probably completely counterproductive anyway; if somebody is trapped in debt and looking for solutions they're more likely to fall in with rising populists figures.
German university students were at the forefront of the Nazi takeover.
That's contrary to Reason's (the publisher) goals
Again: HN’s not very familiar with this source, as other crowds would be.
You can't spend all your days proving Batboy doesn't exist just because Weekly World News published a new article about how he was spotted
Do any debate colleges still exist that have people with a large number of views fairly represented in both student body and faculty? Whose political donations would likewise be across the spectrum? Is there anyone maintaining a list of those that didn’t go totally dogmatic?